Calling Icahn's bluff?

Re: "When to say I quit..."

Ahh, ShelLuser, it seems you've met my dad. Breaking Rule 1 had the consequence of him going through a 2 year jobless period. It also cost me a full year of suspended studies, as the reserves dried out and there was no more money for college.

Though sometimes you have to break the rule, as I've unfortunately found out. When the old boss gets fired, the new boss starts harassing you and all the projects you're "managing" are being actively sabotaged by your boss, it's better just to pull the 'EJECT' lever and hope for the best. It's that, or have your reputation smeared by your employer's inept approach at project management.

UHF

PostgreSQL

Agreed with ShelLuser: they should use PostgreSQL as the main DBMS. Monty is part of why I disliked MySQL and eventually turned back to PostgreSQL ... he hated transactions and thus made MyISAM and the early MySQL releases transactionless. Also, referential integrity was missing because of that.

And well, MariaDB is headed by Monty. Using the transactional stuff requires InnoDB which is owned by ... Oracle. Oops!

Questions

It is one of the few things that is actually useful, and they're axing it? They had already ruined it somewhat in that they made it a Pages-only feature; we used to dole out these for a lot of stuff. But it seems FB doesn't like this feature.

Not quite.

I used to think that when they launched it. But now that I need to expand my storage options, even USB3 is starting to look reeeal slow.

Also, TBolt gives me the option of adding up more Ethernet ports, so I can get extra interfaces on my MBP. So maybe I'll end up buying stuff like this dock, or maybe just the big JBOD array and laying ZFS on top of that.

True

Indeed, x86 should've died long ago. Though this tests might have had some "special sauce" tweaking so that the Intel chips would show up as better, given the "ABI Research provided no details on the content and construction of their benchmarks" part.

@Stephen Channell

Oh, I've always known that ... I used the first Word versions on Mac, years before the Windows counterpart was ported. Though to be fair, sometime around 6.0 I think MS decided to backport the Windoze version back to the Mac. So the Mac version ended up having an ugly UI instead of the neat Mac-native one it had before.

These days, it does seem to fit with OSX, and it has the added benefit of actually keeping the menus they excised on the Windows version.

Re: keen.

Food is not a gas tank refill and nobody is so time-challenged that they can't spend 20-30 minutes a day to prepare proper meals for themselves.

Food is a gas tank refill, as far as our body's concerned. Taste is all about us searching for the best energy-packed food, usually. As for the time-challenged, this is a good option for some types who have jobs where 30 minutes is all you have for eating. Technically, this might be healthier than eating at McD's. Though I'd agree that I'd use it more for emergency rations than everyday eating!

Cellphone remote detonation

The problem with these devices is that theoretically someone might think ahead and fit the device with the infamous dead man's switch ... that is, activate on call or on signal loss/disconnection. Oopsie, cops just blew up everyone with their jammer/killswitch!

TSA

Heh. That happened to my dad; he had his luggage arrive at the other end in a similar fashion. By the way, the note also said something along the lines of "You had a non-compliant lock, so we had to break it open and it is all your fault. TSA won't pay up anything if you are missing stuff."

So not only do they break open your stuff, they basically give anyone else a free pass to steal your stuff!

Re: webOS had the wrong name

Most of the Palm stuff standed out by itself because of PalmOS. Even as late as 2006, the Treo was one of the most wanted smartphones out there, IIRC it could even do video chat. Suddenly Palm decided to spin off the OS division, and all development stagnated.

Then the fugly WinMo came in to fill the gap, and suddenly the Palm 'smartphones' turned into a me-too something running WinMo. They faded into obscurity, and by the time webOS came out, they had been lost in the sea of clunky WinMo "smart"phones.

The same thing is happening right now with Nokia... see how they lost their majority smartphone share overnight after the Elopocalypse...

There's a point...

Now if said computers are doing something safety-critical there is a problem but:

1) Windows is not certified for that by the EULA

Maybe security researchers & honeypots should simply send the kill switch to these botnets. Anyone stupid enough to use Windows for real-time things or actual mission-critical stuff shouldn't be doing so in the first place, and even MS can claim its a violation of the EULA. In most of these cases, only the botnet zombie client is removed.

Re: So

The real scandal here is the DoJ presenting a known DRAFT email as one which was actually sent. I believe if it was a witness who made that statement they would be hauled up on PERJURY charges.

Except it is Apple, and only Apple that claims that the DoJ mail was a draft. It might be that both emails were sent, or that the second one is forged, in which case it would be the Apple lawyers who end up hauled on perjury!

Re: How is the Other Blair (or is it "Lord" Blair) doing these days, btw?

Um... actually Orwell basically put into 1984 the experience of what happened with the USSR and Spain; the former having the "socialist revolution" perverted into a totalitarian state, Spain turning into a fascist state (which unfortunately remained as such for far longer than it should've had). He was actually made an unperson overnight in Spain, and had to flee the country thanks to Franco.

Basically, he used 1984 to warn people about what could happen with "the revolution". Unfortunately, some governments seem to use it as a guideline instead...

That word, it doesn't mean the same things in certain countries

In the US, there's "statutory rape" which strangely covers consensual sex where one of the participants is under the age of consent. So there's a devalued use of the word. In Mexico, we call that "estupro" and thus the actual concept of rape isn't devalued.

And yes, up until recently, in most countries there was no such thing as marital rape. Interestingly, while laws have been fixed on these cases, female-on-male and female-on-female rapes are rarely prosecuted (or even considered as crimes); males trying to press rape charges on females will usually be laughed out of the police station. Sad but true.

Re: Well done Sony.

They had to do it. With both the rootkit fiasco and the OtherOS controversy, they managed to piss off a lot of people, and when they dismissed the latter group, the PS3 got cracked in a matter of months. Up until then, they could proudly say that the PS3 couldn't run pirated games and thus was pirate-proof. Oh, and then they had the PSN hacked as well. Back then, it seemed they didn't get the message, as OtherOS never came back. But it seems they did, to some amount.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been trying to replicate Apple's "the customer does as we tell him" attitude and it shows. They've managed to piss off far more people than Sony ever did: while OtherOS users were a very vocal minority, the demographics annoyed by game sharing bans is far larger. It's even dumber as they can't even hide behind the anti-piracy all-justifying flag that Sony had with OtherOS. MSFT is all about banning legally purchased games from being passed down or resold. Hopefully, they'll stand their ground and have the XBone crash & burn. A massive fail needs to be put as a warning to others...

But they won't do the MS thing.

They pretty much axed the FUD on the "we'll tie in PS4 disks to one console" during the PS4 unveiling. Similar rumors were put out for PS2 and PS3, and both times they were disproven as well. While they did act as true asshats with the whole OtherOS issue, they haven't gone on full evil as their stupid music arm (the rootkit fiasco) or as MS is now doing with the XboxOne.

And with the WiiU also lacking this stupidity, they even have competition on the "we let you play second hand games" camp.

Re: Location is Everything

Agreed. I would love to watch MST3K on Netflix ... but the series isn't available in Mexico. I could do the VPN thingy, but that's cheating. Netflix should be able to serve content worldwide; the problem is that content providers are the ones screwing stuff up, not Netflix per se.

Gah!

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Firstly, they bought wholesale at a discount from the publisher, then sold ebooks AT A LOSS to undercut their competitors. This is called "dumping" and, well, the goal was to build a monopoly.

This is indeed frowned upon, as dumping is usually done with this goal. It is actually illegal in some countries, but in the US it might not be, or has some kind of exceptions. But then, if it is illegal, the publishers could've simply taken Amazon to court instead of trying to go all Judge Dredd on them.

But price-fixing is actually illegal in most countries, including the US. And it seems that they were making it such that they could simply point that it wasn't price-fixing, simply that they couldn't sell for less because of Apple's MFN clause. In reality, they were colluding with Apple, having the price point set higher than what Amazon was getting, thus forcing the market to go much more expensive. And while dumping hurts the consumer in the long term (when the monopoly is established and prices are jacked up), price-fixing hurts the consumer immediately.

The Prez had always used a BB.

Actually Obama DID use an iPhone when he started office, but was told he'd have to switch to a BB for security reasons. ;)

Um, you got that wrong. Obama was using a BlackBerry before he got elected, he was actually asked to switch to a Sectera Edge when he got elected. Finally the NSA let him keep his BlackBerry, after they hardened it a bit more so the Obama BlackBerry is truly one of its kind.

Re: common mistake

Companies transiting to Win7 since 2010 so most are not yet due a replacement cycle

Yes, companies are transitioning to Win7. They're also blocking Win8 for the same reasons most people who aren't MS shills or MS fanboys (I didn't know there was such a thing!) are: Metro/Modern is crap. The Start Screen is crap. Companies want their employees to work, not to dabble with toy interfaces.

Sorry but MORE than one UI for my devices is contra-productive and will eat resources in a corporate environment to boot.

... which is why companies hate Win8 as well. It has more than one UI, and a crap one to boot.

Re: Nice ... Nice ...

Because the Start Menu is the one single thing that made users get up in arms. Actually XP made it less cluttered, by putting all the "My PC", "My Documents" et al in the Start Menu instead of wasting space as icons in the screen. Same with the scrolling menu vs. zillion cascading menus behavior. Vista/7 even improved on this concept.

Nice ... Nice ...

Re: Meh. @Dave 126

A lot of those pet peeves were better managed by later FPS, the ones that didn't give in to Halo. Half-Life put weapons into categories; many of those started using autosave; and BioShock even made a weapon select menu that freezes the game while you select weapons.

Ironically, I found the Halo-style games to be somewhat *harder* than their predecessors, because they also introduced the awful "checkpoint" system from old sidescrolling games. That is, saving will save the game up to the last checkpoint, vs. "right where I am". So if you get 90% through one of the hard as hell segments, but get iced by a lucky shot, you had to start all over again. This is mainly what put me off of Halo and most FPS following this system.

One of the ironies with Duke Nukem Forever is that many reviews basically said that the game was outdated, belongs to 1997, yada yada. The thing is that the reasons that DNF ended up being a lemon is because it actually incorporated the Halo-style combat, linear levels & similar stuff... so the game just felt like reskinned Halo instead of a Duke Nukem game. :(

Meh.

Shit game gets exclusive for shit OS. Keep moving, nothing to see here.

Really, Halo is one of the reasons most FPS have devolved into the tripe they are today: two weapon limit, regenerating health, linear levels ... see any Call of Battlefield Modern Warfare Nukem Forever.

Anyone thinking ObjC is better than C++/Java has got to be an Apple fanboi. Smalltalk was an interesting language for learning OOP, but for serious stuff I found C syntax to be far more useful. Thus I ended up going down the C++, later Java branch of programming languages. Objective C looks like the ugly match of C and Smalltalk, neither one or the other. Yeech!

And I agree that HTML5 is a shitty option for real app development. His Jobsiness tried that approach with the first iPhone, utterly failed and eventually caved in to demands of an SDK being released. webOS also failed on that regard. Unless they release an actual native SDK, it might not gain enough traction. Though I suspect it is on its way...

Re: What Nokia did @Jemma

Yes, Nokia was doing pretty good decisions, even with the infighting between the consumer and enterprise divisions they had. At least, up until Elop came in and shat all over Nokia. Sadly, I had considered jumping ship to Nokia when they started releasing interesting stuff like the N900, but then Elop happened.

Re: HTC invested too much in Win 8 - CURSE OF MS

Curse of MS indeed. HTC has both an Android and a Microsoft arm. The MS side is a curse for anyone involved on that: Sendo, Palm, Nokia and it seems that HTC is in there. Even more as they were among the suckers who actually bought into WinRT/Win8.

Had they invested more on the Android side (which they did pull off successfully in earlier years), maybe they wouldn't be where they are...

Not surprising

The only game they made that actually caught my eye was Mafia Wars, but on the Tagged network, not FB. That version wasn't spammy. Then when I had a fairly decent level, they decided to kill the Tagged version and "migrate" us to the FB one. Not only did I lose interest because of having to rebuild everything and level up, the FB one was depending on spammy stuff and thus I got bored. Quickly.

And then Farmville/Cityville spam made me hate them even more. Whatever. The ship's still sinking, but it has been treading water for quite some time. It is only now that they realize it...